No Rest for the Wicked (or the Weary)

Yeah, I know, I know, it’s been a while since we’ve posted anything new here. That does not mean, however, that we’ve become a bunch of idle layabouts resting on the laurels of our success with The Nemesis Crystals.

The truth is, we’re kind of like a duck swimming across a pond: everything you see is calm and serene, but underneath that duck is furiously paddling its little webbed feet for all its worth. Same here.

For one thing, we’re still setting up shop. You see, we’re serious about what we’re doing with Cogito Orbis Press — we’re not some “one shot wonder” who cobbles together a manuscript, gins up some half-arsed cover out of clip art we scavenged from the Interwebs, then packs it all off to Lulu or Create Space while we call ourselves a “press” or a “publishing house.” Instead, because we’re here for the long run, and plan to publish not only our own work but the works of other authors, we’re creating a real, live, functioning business. Which means we have to jump through all the hoops of incorporation, making sure we’ve dotted every “t” and crossed every “i” along the way. Then we have to get the lawyers and accountants involved, to be certain our contracts are properly written and our bookkeeping is accurate, and our documentation is sound. (You should read our environmental impact statement sometime….) Yeah, we’ve got suits involved. We’re doing our best to keep that to minimum, and slapping their hands whenever they try to stick a finger into a pie that they’ve got no business touching, but in the end it’s impossible to escape them entirely.

Another thing is that we also have other commitments and responsibilities. Now we all know that Daniel Allen Butler is the one who really does all the heavy lifting around here — the plotting and wordsmithing and so on — while Scott Bragg just sits around designing covers, providing the technical advice that keeps our cyberpunk world from looking like a bad reboot of Tron, and occasionally coming up with a good plot twist or character idea. But Scott has a real day job as well, doing something vaguely IT-ish for some company that supports major financial institutions, and that does take up a lot of his time. (It’s all very hush-hush, and you have to sign an NDA before Scott can tell you that he can’t tell you anything about what he does, but trust me on this, it really is important. Imagine not being able to use your VISA or MasterCard and you get the general idea of how important it is.) Dan, meanwhile, already has a successful career as a military and maritime historian, with ten non-fiction books already published through maninstream publishing houses. (If you didn’t know that, you should have, and you need to get your hairless pink bahookie over to

and buy some of his books. For that matter, buy all of them. You’ll be glad you did. So will Dan.) But the point is that Dan has non-fiction books under contract, and those contracts have deadlines, and Dan has to meet those deadlines or Dan loses money. You wouldn’t like Dan when he loses money. So, Dan has been busy working feverishly in Pearl: the 7th Day of December 1941, which will be published by Casemate Publishing in the Spring of 2017. (Remenber, you heard it here first.)

But most important of all is that Dan and Scott are hard at work on the second book of The Blade Files: The Achilles Gambit, which is on track for release at the end of January 2017. Snippets will be appearing on this very website beginning in December. While we have no intention of giving away the plot — we want you to buy the book and read it, obviously! — we can let you know that the story it tells essentially picks up where The Nemesis Crystals ended, and there will be some familiar faces, along with several new ones, and a few unexpected cameos. But while it begins where The Nemesis Crystals left off, the story told in The Achilles Gambit goes in a very different direction. There will be terrorism, assassination, blackmail, high-level political intrigue, and low-level dirty tricks galore. No, don’t look for spoilers here — aside from the fact that you’ll learn what happens when Blade loses at a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘Em….